Re: Convert userdata to hex string

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Peter Smith <psmith135@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could someone please give a function sample that could do the trick? If it
> requires an extension it would great if it was working in win32.

Here she is, nice & simple (as C extensions go):

// a little extension to access arbitrary userdata as a string
#include <lua.h>
#include <lauxlib.h>
#include <lualib.h>

static int l_as_string (lua_State *L) {
    void *data = lua_touserdata(L,1);
    int sz;
    if (data == NULL) {
        lua_pushnil(L);
        lua_pushstring(L,"not userdata!");
        return 2;
    } else {
        sz = lua_objlen(L,1);
        lua_pushlstring(L,data,sz);
        return 1;
    }
}

static const luaL_reg userdata[] = {
    {"as_string",l_as_string},
    {NULL,NULL}
};

__declspec(dllexport)
LUALIB_API int luaopen_userdata(lua_State *L)
{
    luaL_register (L, "userdata", userdata);
    return 1;
}

(the _declspec(dllexport) is Windows stuff that can be removed)

Build against LfW libraries

cl /LD /I\lua\include userdata.c \lua\lib\lua5.1.lib

And here it is:

C:\lang\lua\projects> lua -luserdata
Lua 5.1.4  Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> s,err = userdata.as_string(io.stdout)
> = s
ÿ←∟x
> = #s
4

Which is exactly what we expect; the contents of a file userdata is a
pointer to the actual FILE* object.  However, we are on shaky ground,
because the assumption is that module developers may change the
userdata representation as long as they keep the external API the
same.

Drop me a line if you have difficulty building this...

steve d.